Phaz - Have you beaten it or are you just quoting partially in? Because it really reads like you're partially in...
1) Boss Design- The bosses and indeed trash are designed around the characters limited options, resulting in a lot of samey bullshit. I feel this is largely due to the lack of both defensive builds and ranged weapons. So pretty much every boss mostly boils down to roll past swipe repeat, until it goes super saiyan 3 for the last part of its health bar. There are some exceptions and sometimes you need farmed item X to cheese it, but most are similar. It would be a lot like if every boss in DS2 was basically a reskinned Pursuer.
There's some reused gimmicks, but most are unique from each other - yes, some basic strategies do work frequently (although not always, and for those cases it doesn't it's basically instant suicide)
You played a different Dark Souls than me if you don't think most of the bosses in the other Souls had many common elements. (And Smelter a gear check? WTF - gear didn't matter that fight, he's basically identical to many of the Bloodborne fights besides the AE pulse)
2) Itemization- There is none. Once you get the holy sword, the other weapons might as well not even exist. Armor is just cosmetics and resists, with no choices to be made like the rest of the series. I know they wanted to prevent cheap wins, but its just.... boring.. not being able to do poise guy, bow guy, faith guy, and so on.
Armor was always a ridiculously minor factor - and Holy Sword I found to be incredibly weak myself, playstyle matters - I stuck to the Cane and I'm very happy with it. Sword was terrible for me. I saw a streamer using Kirkhammer up through the finale. Axe a number have stuck with.
It was actually nice having itemization done in such a way you didn't have to keep saying "Oh, well that weapons garbage now, time to learn a new moveset" 10+ times during the game.
3) Difficulty- In prior games in the series, if you hit the wall in a zone, you could farm up a new weapon or swap out gear to try a new tactic to work past it if you were not up to the basic execution. This one, the execution is all there is, so until you do it how they want you are not going past no matter how much you farm. This is not a complaint about it being hard, as I feel Demons Souls was by far the hardest of the series. This is more about the lack of options. There is no Iron King positioning fight or Smelter gear check fight, to say nothing of the other numerous unique bosses in the last three games. Its all dodge/swipe/run.
No, just no - Level is a huge factor in this one, very much so compared to Souls - I used to not bother leveling anymore than I needed to for gear in Souls because it had so little impact (and is clearly demonstrated by people winning with SL1) - in Bloodborne leveling is crucial and improves survivability a ton. With how I made my build I could toe to toe with basically any trash even in the end phases. Hell, I face to faced Mergo and Gerhardt in some of their phases - soaking some damage then wailing back on them to get the free heals.
1) Level Design- Gorgeous, but the whole game seems to be designed to make swinging your weapon without it banging the walls as hard as possible. Add to that tons of obvious ambush gimmicks that the game copy pastes all over the place and I think the layouts have taken a step backward. In prior games, claustrophobia was the exception NOT the rule.
It's intended to be horror, not dark fantasy... thus... the above... it fits the format of the game perfectly.
2) Camera- Worst in the series. The lock on drops out randomly and spins shit all over when it doesn't ditch the lock. The new twitch combat and emphasis on obstacles in the environment greatly aggravate this.
Not once did I have a camera issue - sounds like a user issue.
3) Farming- Its one thing to make me wait for long loads after each death. Its another to make me refarm heal potions periodically. Making me do this with the twitch combat and a complete lack of tactical variety makes it too grindy for me. And I say this as someone who did not abuse glitches in any of these games to get souls. It just drives home the limited nature of the combat, compared to the rest of the series. Not being able to direct travel from one lantern to another just piles it on, too. I mean, the first game in the series had better fast travel.
I had to farm potions about a total of three times over the entire game - most areas had plenty of mobs with a potential drop - not to mention once you're getting a good number of souls per kill it just becomes more efficient to slap on Moon rune (or all 3 once you have them - they do stack) and just farm up 30k souls or so and max out the entire inventory + stash.
4) PvE Coop- I wanted to break the boredom of farming by doing some co op. Not only does this shit not work, but the giant text box it flashes while it is busy not working blocks important parts of the UI. Seriously fire whoever thought that was a good idea.
ITs still a good game, especially for the PS4. But its the most limited and poorly executed of the series.[/QUOTE]
